Tuesday, October 26, 2010

In situations where we see contradictions, the answer is often that there are two dimensions that are involved but we are only acknowledging one of them.That is what is going on with the subject we are looking at - the origin and development of species.There are actually two dimensions. You could call one the horizontal and one the vertical.Cladistics for example, does not acknowledge the vertical dimension and tries to collapse everything into the horizontal line of time. This can never be successful of course.The Linnaean conception acknowledges the vertical dimension but not the horizontal dimension.Both dimensions must be acknowledged because REALITY is in two dimensions.It is only when we acknowledge both dimensions that we will understand the underlying reality.

For what it is worth, the closest we come now, is the conception of serial anagenesis with parallel evolution. That is the model I use in the pterosaur to bird theory.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

CIRCULARITY:http://www.bio.fsu.edu/James/Ornitho...phs%202009.pdf
"The congruence of other characters is sometimes
offered as justification for such assumptions:
birds are theropods because they share
other characters with theropods and, therefore,
must have the same digital identities as theropods
(e.g., Wagner and Gauthier 1999, Makovicky and
Dyke 2001, Padian 2001b). This reasoning is circular.
Synapomorphies are invoked to defend the
hypothesis; the hypothesis is invoked to defend
the synapomorphies."

Saturday, October 9, 2010

Here is the larger context to put this in, related to "normal science".http://gothling.tripod.com/paradigm.html
"Textbooks, more than perhaps any other force in science, represent the bulwarks of existing paradigms. Students of science learn to deal with the world around them in the context of the paradigm they are taught. Ideally, students then grapple with the issues left unresolved within their paradigm and thus continue what Kuhn [Thomas Kuhn] calls the enterprise of "normal science"--"an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies". In dealing with nature through an existing paradigm, scientists are inherently conservative. They generally shun new theories that may shake their views of the world. According to Kuhn, however, this conservatism is not only inevitable, it is desirable: "By focusing attention upon a small range of relatively esoteric problems, the paradigm forces scientists to investigate some part of nature in a detail and depth that would otherwise be unimaginable". Normal science is essential for fact-gathering that may help confirm, clarify, or even extend paradigms. They also help to match facts with theory, and they even help to make theories more acceptable by, for instance, making them more aesthetically palatable. More fundamentally, normal science can be seen as puzzle-solving, where paradigms determine the parameters and rules for the puzzle. In other words, the paradigm sets the parameters in which scientists may view the world. Researchers must then attempt to solve the puzzles by looking for missing pieces and connecting them into a cohesive whole.

Where Paradigms Fail. This [normal science] period of puzzle solving, however, is often disrupted by discovery, at which point scientists must call into question the rules by which they were solving the puzzle. Restated, "Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly, i.e. with the recognition that nature has somehow violated the paradigm-induced expectations that govern normal science". Anomaly must emerge within the context of an existing paradigm--otherwise, scientists would be unable to even recognize it."

It purports to show the relationships between certain taxa and implies the validity of the dino to bird theory.
But what it actually does is, it assumes the validity of the dino to bird theory and then shows that if that theory is valid here is how the taxa would be related.
If only they would be honest and say that, things would be so much clearer.

This pattern occurs quite frequently. The authors of many, many studies and articles do not evaluate the validity of the dino to bird theory. THEY ASSUME the validity of the theory and then arrange things around that assumption.
And then people in this field say that the dino to bird theory is valid because look at how much validating material there is over the years. They forget (ignore) that those studies were based on the assumption of the dino to bird theory.

Note

This site presents the idea that pterosaurs (rather than dinosaurs) developed into birds. This is not an "evolutionism" vs. "creationism" issue.An "evolutionist" can say that the pterosaur to bird developments are due to neo-Darwinian means (random mutation and natural selection).On the other hand, a "creationist" can say that those developments are the acts of a higher intelligence.This site does not take a position on the "evolutionism" vs. "creationism" question.

Philosophy

Like most people, I have philosophical ideas that go beyond the nuts and bolts of the scientific analysis of the origin and development of birds.There are larger questions that philosophers have grappled with since the most ancient times. If anyone is interested in my take on those more philosophical ideas, click here.But please realize that all the ideas of this site are pure materialist, scientific ideas supported by physical evidence and scientific studies.

The 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer astutely summarized the three stages through which all truth passes: first, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed;

and third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

"In the choice between changing one's mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof."~John Kenneth Galbraith

Keywords

origin of birds, pterosaur is the ancestor of modern birds, birds did not evolve from dinosaurs, cladistics, stratocladistics, Cretaceous, Mesozoic, fossil record, BAD, BAND, birds are not dinosaurs, flightless birds, aves